Music by Leonid Klinichev Performers by soloists of the Mariinsky Academy
of Young Opera Singers

For the closing of the festival there is a world premiere in store. The
idea of staging an opera based on the novel The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy belonged
to Larisa Gergieva, artistic director of the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers.
For the composer Leonid Klinichev this premiere will become a natural
development of two big stories. This Cossack saga began for the future composer
in his childhood when he was really fascinated by Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows
the Don. He even remembers his parents taking the book away from him, fearing
that the young boy would not be able to understand anything in the adult novel.
Later, as a postgraduate student of the Moscow Conservatory, Klinichev decided
to compose an opera of the same name and, instead of limiting himself to a mere
folklore expedition, as most of his colleagues did, went to live in Kuban. He
has collected four hundred Cossack songs since then, and his opera plan was
transformed into a ballet. In 1987 And Quiet Flows the Don was staged by the
choreographer Nikolai Boyarchikov in the Leningrad Maly Opera Theater, and after
the premiere the composer met Maestro Gergiev. Here begins the second story,
the one about cooperation with the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers. For the
Academy students the composer wrote Bela, an opera based on the story by Mikhail
Lermontov that was first performed at the Mariinsky Concert Hall in 2014. The
present season saw the premiere of Anna, a mono-opera dedicated to Anna
Akhmatova. Now the composer is back to the Cossack theme. Each of these works is
somehow linked to the Romantic tradition, for Klinichev’s musical language is
very close to that old-fashioned, noble style of the late 19th century’s grand
operas.